SERE

Recently there has been an aggressive media campaign to justify
torture as a tool of official U.S. government policy: Attempts have
been made not only by Dick Cheney and others implicated in past
practices, but also by a variety of media allies who seem determined
to soften up public perception in support of future imperatives. Most
notably is the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who recently ran the second of two columns
(to date) defending torture.

 

Krauthammer, like other advocates of torture as a tool of official
government policy, begs the question: He assumes, in the premises of
his arguments, that which he wants to prove: First, that subjects in custody know the location of a ticking
bomb or a hostage; Second, that the authorities somehow know that the
subjects in custody possess this knowledge (without themselves
possessing this knowledge); Third, that standard law-enforcement
interrogation techniques have not only failed to produce the
information sought, but will continue to do so; and that torture,
instead of eliciting a false confession (stopping the torture by
telling interrogators what they want to hear), will produce the
information which the subject is "known to possess".

The obvious question here is, how do interrogators know what
knowledge the subject possesses without themselves possessing that
knowledge?